Screening Transcendence

Robert Dassanowsky is Professor of German/Austrian Studies and Film at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He is author of Austrian Cinema: A History, and editor of World Film Locations: Vienna, and Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds: A Manipulation of Metafilm. He is also an independent film producer.

Highly recommended.(Choice) Screening Transcendence is so rich and informative that a short review can barely do justice to this important and interesting monograph. There is no doubt that this is a book that everyone interested in Austria during the 1930s should read.(Journal of Austrian Studies) Screening Transcendence undoubtedly constitutes a major contribution to the study of Austrian Cinema.....This little known episode in film history which Dassanowsky has uncovered ... tells of the unfolding drama of the Austrians' attempt to work with Hollywood studios in an effort to escape German pressure. He attributes the failure of an Austrian-Hollywood partnership to the American industry's commercial interests and its fear of offending German markets, as well as the strong German influence in Hollywood. Screening Transcendence does a great service by introducing this era to English-reading audiences... utterly fascinating.... (Contemporary Austrian Studies) Dassanowsky's carefully researched book provides an excellent account of Austrian film from those years and also forms, thanks to the inclusion of titles and production details of films from the era, a good basis for further research.(FILMBLATT) The author is at home in both the European and the American cultural worlds, and he utilizes this to best advantage in his book. Anyone seeking an expert presentation of the particular influence Austrian film culture has had on Hollywood is well served by this meticulous and richly detailed work.(German Studies Review) Robert Dassanowsky's Screening Transcendence provides the most comprehensive English-language examination to date of the complex and often neglected top of cinema under the Austrofascist regime of 1933 to 1938.(Monatshefte)

• AcknowledgementsForewordPart I: Structures1. System of Faith and Aesthetics of Loss: Austrian Cultural Politics in the First Republic and the Christian Corporate State 2. Scopic Regimes: Notes on Newsreel and Culture Film Production, the Legacy of Baroque and Fin de Siècle Vienna, and Political Catholicism in Public Spectacle3. Against Nazism and with Catholicism? Two Film Industries and the Jewish Filmmaker's Conundrum Part II: Genres and Types4. Cinema Baroque: Reconsidering the Willi Forst/Walter Reisch Viennese Film Genre and its Trans/National/ist Value5. Projecting Transcendence: Emigrantenfilm, the Church, and the Construction of a Catholic-Political Identity in Singende Jugend and Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld 6. Gendering the Crusade: Female Types and Sexuality in Feature Film7. Tales of the Patriarchy: Of Cavaliers, Cads, and the Common Man 8. Reasonable Fantasies: Cine-Operetta, the Sängerfilm, and Sociocritical Music Film9. New Order Out of Chaos: The Austrian Screwball and Hybrid Comedy 10. Contemporary Conflicts: Experimentalism, Controversy, and the Question of National Film Style 11. Snow Blinded: The Alps versus Vienna in Film at the End of the Regime Part III: Locations12. From Rome to the Hollywood Hope: Shared Aesthetics, the 1936/37 Vienna-Hollywood Co-Production Plan, and Cine-Economic Brinkmanship with BerlinEpilogue Filmography: List of Austrian Feature Films 1933-1938BibliographyIndex